


Tabula rasa

by dawittiest



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Gen, Injury, Scars, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-22 23:34:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13774956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawittiest/pseuds/dawittiest
Summary: Something happens to Matt – his body, somehow, can heal fast. Scary fast. This is a good thing. Right?





	Tabula rasa

**Author's Note:**

> Another ficlet from the sprint challenge on Daredevil discord (come join us)! The prompt was “scars”. It’s short, but I liked the idea so I polished it up and decided to post it here. Please tell me what you think!
> 
> Thanks to ever-amazing DancingPlague for beta.

His body used to be a book. A story of journey written in the mountains and valleys of coarse scar tissue. Violence’s own language, like Braille, you could read by tracing your fingertips over hardened old wounds – testimonies of things he went through. Left shoulder: a bullet graze, warehouse, chaos of too many bodies and bullets, cocky. Right thigh, high up: knife cut, sliced open again and again, never quite healed, a sting of pain that’s a familiar tune to his step. Lower belly: nasty coagulated skin-knot, searing agony, how he almost died, gutted like an animal, that first time.

Matt runs his fingers over his stomach, the slabs of his pectorals muscles, his clavicles, creases of his hips. Smooth expanse of skin. Unblemished. He touches the side of his left hand – old burn scar, where he banged his arm on a fire-hot stove when he was seven. Even that is gone. Every memory, every physical memento of the pain his body has lived with, erased.

The first time it happened, he went to Claire. He took a metal rod to his leg and his fibula snapped, a clean break. The assailant swung at his head and Matt ducked, found new balance on his broken leg, and carried on. When the fight died down, men unconscious at his feet, he didn’t even feel the pain anymore. Matt tested the weight on his leg – nothing crunched, no splinters grinding. He dug his fingers into the muscle, feeling for a break; nothing. The bone was intact. Had he imagined the pain? His fingers went to the gash on his biceps from the night before. Gone, too, not even a faint scar to mark it had been there. Was he going crazy? He didn’t know what to do, so he went to Claire. Claire always knew what to do.

She sat him down and drew his blood – the puncture instantly smoothed over, like a wrinkle in a fabric, _freaky_ , she said – and did myriad little tests to quantify and qualify this new material reality in which his vulnerable human body no longer was a liability. She didn’t come to a satisfying conclusion, just an attestation of the overt – that his body, somehow, can heal fast. Scary fast.

And she said, _you’re lucky. Going out every night, volunteering another pint of blood for this city like you do, you should count your blessings, and_ this _? This is a blessing. I, for one, am grateful that something, whatever it is, will keep you safe so I don’t end up elbows-deep in your open wounds the next time you go looking for trouble._

Now, Matt strokes his finger along the length of his arm; no reminders of past hurt, nothing to make him sick remembering. This is a blessing. His pain, erased like it never happened.

But it did happen. He hurt so much. He drowns it in dry humor, buries it down, _I’m fine, my city needs me out there, I’m fine, I’m fine_ , but he’s hurt _so much_. He ached and bled and almost died a thousand times over – and what does he have to show for it? He searches for assurances, the tangible evidence of what he’s suffered. What he’s overcome. He doesn’t find it. Where does all this pain go to? It sits in his lungs, heavy like a bag of stones pulling him to the bottom of a lake. The scars are gone, like it never happened, but in his mind, it’s still happening. But if there are no marks, is the pain even real? Was it ever real at all?

_You’re lucky, lucky, lucky._

He needs it to be real.

Matt puts a match to the inside of his wrist. The delicate skin withers from heat, puckers all pain-red and closes up. Erased. Like it never happened.

Matt fires up another match. It’s okay. He has a whole box left.


End file.
